As Benedict Anderson made clear in 1991; the media are superior creators and perpetuators of nations as imagined communities. Ulf Lundell’s ”Öppna landskap” (”Open landscapes”; 1982) is a song that was immediately appropriated as kind of new national anthem; no matter which were the artist’s intentions. In line with this; my interest in the song focuses on the way it represents an update of “Swedishness” at a time when a national identity crisis is approaching. I will depart from that key feature of Romanticism which literary critic Horace Engdahl has named ”the living gaze” and; to Lundell’s generation; connects the Swedish visa tradition to rock in Swedish. Theories of the experience society; post-colonial criticism and eco criticism are used to discuss the presuppositions of Lundell’s effort.